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Living on Mission: Part 1
What does your job today have to do with God's global agenda?
Hello Friend,
The next few issues of CCN will touch on various topics that I hope will be of help as you come alongside people in your church who desire to live on mission here or abroad.
That mission has been the same from the very beginning of time — to bring glory to God among all people. Throughout Scripture, we see God created the universe, intervened in the lives of men, orchestrated events, and redeemed situations to fulfill this one purpose of receiving worship from every tribe, tongue, and nation.
But many people who are not pastors or missionaries often wonder, That’s a grand plan, but what does my job today have to do with it?
A 2014 survey by Letourneau University’s Center for Faith & Work revealed that 70% of churched people are unsure how their work serves God, and 78% say their work is less valuable than a pastor’s.
Those are alarming statistics, because a person’s job has everything to do with God accomplishing His global purpose!
God, at His core, is not a lazy God but a God of works. By the work of His hands, He formed majestic mountains and deep valleys, gentle streams and raging rivers, plants and animals both great and small. “He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed time and the boundaries of their habitation” (Acts 17:26).
From that earliest moment in the garden, God was setting up the foundations of our universe and the fabric of the society we live in today. He commissioned the people He made to be creative workers, and to imitate Him by bringing Him glory through the work of their hands.
God Himself introduced Adam to the concept of work and said, “It is good.” By putting Adam in the garden of Eden “to work it and keep it,” God instituted the first marketplace and established its sacredness.
There is no known society today that does not have the God-given instinct to work, and it is still good. Our work holds the same sacred service to God that Adam’s did in the garden. It holds the same sacred worship as the hour we spend at church on Sunday. Why? Because God ordained that our work is our service (another translation of the Hebrew word avodah in Genesis 2:15).
This God we serve — master architect, precise engineer, unique homemaker, great physician, wise counselor, loving shepherd, and omniscient teacher — has established every honest profession in the marketplace today and is glorified through each one. He accomplishes His work of reconciling all things through all His people in all their professions.
So what does our sacred work, whatever it may be, have to do with the “all nations” part of God’s plan?
More than 60% of the world’s population live in places closed to what we call missionaries. Yet, there stands before the church today a vast door of opportunity for God’s people from other also-sacred professions!
Disciple-makers who understand this divine perspective of work have the potential to multiply the spread of the gospel among the least-reached. They, alongside missionaries, are a vital part of God’s global agenda.
Doctors, lawyers, pastors, architects, Bible teachers, real estate agents, counselors, and anyone else who works in service to God, can turn the world upside down for Jesus. ●
In Christ,
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